Month: May 2014

Like so many words, romance has been banalized in western culture. Coming to a head in what we now know as medieval chivalry, it’s become associated with more mundane items today, like chocolate and Valentine’s cards. Those medieval tales talked of chivalric adventure and didn’t combine the idea of love until late into the 17th century.

Romance, then, has something to do with flowers and candlelight dinners, but much more to do with tilting at windmills it appears. And it is in this latter sense that we embark on our adventure today.

And like words such as service and humility and reverence, this definition of romance can seem a little fuddy duddy in our hip and flip era where nothing is sacred and all is looked at with a jaundiced eyes from our position of bitchin’ awesomeness.

But romance is anything but lame. And nowhere near as anachronistic as modern society would like to believe. Let’s go a little deeper into romance today.

Recapturing the Flavor of Romance, today on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head.

A reading of modern scientific and philosophical thought can be unnverving. Human beings, goes this materialistic scientific view, are the product of causes that are accidental and purposeless. All individual achievements are destined to extinction in the vast entropy of a universe relentlessly bound for ruin.

We are nothing but gigantic lumbering robots built by our genes as survival machines, asserts Richard Dawkins, a leading proponent of this modernist stance.

And I’m not exaggerating the bleakness. Reading Dawkins or geneticist Steve Jones (no relation) or philosopher Bertrand Russell is a depressing journey that reduces Man’s greatest imaginings to the garbage heap of cold, unforgiving material forces that care not a whit for such romantic notions as hopes and ideals.

It’s all so very modern. No good and evil, no confusing purpose, just relentless survival over incomprehensible time periods.